usb installation issues

Hi everyone, I had posted this issue before and it was closed since I used a third party installation process but I have gone through the same process in the wiki now with the same problems. My problem is with my arch installation which I am doing on an x220. I used an 8 gig usb to boot arch off and when I plugged it into the laptop went through the installation on the website no problem and in the fdisk operations it displayed that the arch installation is on sdb and my laptop hard drive is sda. I completed my installation and installing using pacstrap on sea with no issues but when I rebooted and tried to boot an existing OS it dosent seem to work and I am suspecting that the usb never transfers anything to sea since arch is still on sdb is there anything I should add to my installation process to get this to work and have arch installed on sda and so the boot existing OS works. Thanks for your time and sorry for the repost

Re: usb installation issues

Is CSM (Compatibility Support Module) enabled in your laptop's firmware? If it is, you're booting in BIOS mode, then your grub line is correct. If not you're booting in UEFI mode and you have to consult the wiki for those instructions.

Also, please fix your command inputs. For what you said was three: boot was mounted without a formatted filesystem on sda2, swap was correctly initialized on sda3, and despite you saying you made a /home partition it is instead under / which is sda1.

Accurate information is for your own benefit, the more is it the better the answers you will get.

Re: usb installation issues

Also, according to those steps, you never actually installed grub in the target system, so the grub commands you vaguely referred to in the chroot would have failed and you would not have a boot loader. This would explain your symptoms.

Re: usb installation issues

Note the differing instructions for whether you are booting in BIOS or UEFI mode. That mode, if your firmware has it, is called "CSM". If CSM is enabled, you follow the BIOS instructions. If CSM is disabled, you follow the UEFI instructions. If CSM is not an option in your firmware then consult the manufacturer's documentation for which mode the machine uses.

Re: usb installation issues

I am booting into bios I checked for the file in efi and its not there. Sorry I don't post on here much so I apologize for the crap instructions was going off memory of my thought process of the installation how would I install grub on the target system? Is my order for making and mounting the partitions wrong? And is this issue separate than when I should install grub? Since I put a grub install command but should I be changing that command?

Re: usb installation issues

Okay so I went through the process again and went through the proper order of mounting and installing grub to sda and then also made the config file on sda just like the grub made said but still the same issue of when I reboot and try to boot off existing OS it does not activate grub and when I take the USB out and click the boot existing OS it says that it failed to load COM32 file boot/syslinux/chain.c32 and when I put the ISB back in I get back to the arch linux menu I am not sure what the next steps would be from here

Re: usb installation issues

Sorry not entirely sure what you mean by change order. In fdisk it says that sdb is the disk that is the usb because it is only 8 gigs and sda is my hard drive since it is much larger so I put grub on my hard drive and partioned by hard drive into four since that is where I want to put arch and so Im not sure what I should be doing different to achieve that

Re: usb installation issues

Please post the output of

# fdisk -l

That's a lower-case L as the root user.

Perhaps you should start with a basic partition. You could always much around with them later or leave them. If your system is BIOS then you don't need a separate /boot. So scratch that. Same for /home. You might not even want to have a SWAP either - you can set up a swap file (SSD..) if you like instead.

So, with one physical drive, an optional swap partition of the same size as your installed RAM - for example type 8GB when fdisk is asking for size. Then after that option, rest of the drive as root ( / ).

What if you want to future-proof your system by making the best choices now? Don't worry about it. Really. Build up Arch a few times to the way you think you want it and each time you will be building experience. Which you then take to the next time you build Arch up. It's a learning experience after all, once you figure out the best ways for you along the way you'll have picked up so many little skills you didn't know you needed.